Dario gulped in an uneven breath. “I led him to you, is that what you want to hear? It’s true! I didn’t mean to do it or want to, but I did.” He was weeping, sobs hitting him like blows. “Go ahead. Hit me. Hit me!”

Jess might have, if only to stop the other young man’s self-pity, but he saw movement out of the corner of his eye and lifted the glow to check.

The opening in the ceiling had a thin curl of white mist coming out of it, like a lazy whisper. Something hissed far in the distance.

Something rattled. The hiss grew louder.

“I’ll hit you later!” Jess said, and shoved Dario up the steps ahead of him. He felt a wave of sudden heat wash over him, damp as clammy skin. He scrambled up and nearly slipped on the foggy stairs; the steam boiling up from beneath came faster now, a hot white cloud that seared his lungs when he gasped.

Dario grabbed him and towed him up the last few steps into the open air, and as Jess fell to his knees, a geyser of solid white steam shot up into the air behind him and climbed into the sky in a towering explosion.

Then it blew away in a hiss of hot droplets on the wind, and all that was left was a spray of water on the street where it had fallen.

Jess looked up at Dario, and for just a moment, he wasn’t angry anymore. Maybe that would come again later. Didn’t matter.

He nodded. Dario returned it and walked away.

Santi crouched next to Jess. “Can you breathe?”

“Yes,” Jess said. It hurt a little, but he didn’t think it was as bad as he’d feared. His skin was tender from the steam, but no worse than an Alexandrian sunburn. “I’m all right, sir.”

“Good.” Santi leaned back on his heels and looked around. “Where are we?” The day was cloudy, a typical enough London day, and the gray pall made everything look dim and ancient. Jess had no trouble placing the outlines of buildings and the expanse of the bridge, but it seemed darker than it should. Smoky.

“London. Close to the bank of the River Thames,” Jess said. “Near Blackfriars Bridge.”

“How far to the Serapeum?”

“Walking? Not close enough.” He looked around. The bridge was some distance, but he saw it was full of people streaming across. Odd, that. There normally wasn’t such congestion in the middle of the day to cross the river. He heard the distant honking of steam-carriage horns.

Morgan took out the Codex she’d put in the pocket of her dress. The quill had survived, and she unwrapped the padded bottle of ink and quickly dipped the pen into it to scribble on the open page. “I’m telling your father where we are,” she said. “And to call off his men at the Serapeum. There’s no sense in risking them there if we aren’t coming.”